HTC Desire review

Few weeks ago, I got myself the HTC Desire. The Desire is the cousin to the Google Nexus One, with just a little bit of extra features and different design. Powered by 1GHz Snapdragon processor and 576MB of RAM, you can imagine how fast and smooth this phone is. The Desire is running on Android 2.1 Eclair, which updates for Android 2.2 Froyo is already on going for Europe set owners.

Hardware

The retail set comes with standard package. Charger, earpiece, micro USB cable and a 2GB SD card which is definitely too little to use on this gadget. SIS Malaysia should have done better by providing a larger size SD card as same like Touch HD which I owned quite some time ago. Even the overseas retail sets comes with a8GB SD card.

Once you turned on the HTC Desire, there is no turning back to your old Winmo phones. It’s fast, smooth, way too smooth compared to my Touch HD. If you owned a HD2, it’ll be a different story though.

Desire comes with 3.7 inch Amoled display. Compared to Touch HD and the iPhone 3Gs, the latter ones actually have a slightly wider screen compared to Desire. Yet, the screen’s height is longer though.

The Amoled display is gorgeous. It’s bright, colorful and responsive. To be honest, the color is a bit over saturated and a bit too responsive. Until you get use to the responsiveness of the screen, you might end up accidentally clicking on some apps and buttons that you don’t want to.

The build of the phone is solid. It might not be as solid as the HTC Legend’s unibody design, but it’s just acceptable. The back of the phone comes with soft-rubberish finish which is very nice to hold with. The downside of the back cover is that you need to rip open the back cover using the top slit. You might break the back cover if you are not careful enough when opening it, although I haven’t seen any report regarding this. The Sim card and SD card slot is located under the battery which the battery have to be removed in order to gain access to it. So hot swap is not possible.

Compared to Google Nexus One, the trackball feature had changed to optical track-pad instead. Noise cancellation on Nexus One is left out but Desire comes with physical buttons instead of touch-sensitive buttons.

The 5 megapixels autofocus camera captures 5:3 wide still images. The photo quality is acceptable, and there are options for white balance and ISO for you to play with. Video capture offers 800×400 resolution and is pretty good as well. The Froyo updates actually enables 720p / H.264 video capturing capability though.

The battery life for Desire is one of the downside for this phone. Occasionally web browsing, listening to songs, sms, phone calls and playing some games during the day, you’ll be very lucky if the battery can last for more than 18 hours. Heavy usage at one time might last you around 5-7 hours. The charging cable must be with you all the time if you want to stay connected before you get home.

Software

HTC Sense UI is one of the best custom UI made for Android phones so far. The Homescreen widgets, Friendstream Apps, Social Network integration for contacts and also the great keyboard compared to the lousy stock Android keyboard. Flashlite is pre-installed so most of the flash contents on websites can be shown on your chrome browser, even flash videos too! But some of the flash contents are a bit laggy which you will see a better experience once updated to Android 2.2 Froyo.

Wrap-up

Overall, the HTC Desire is a great phone. One of the greatest Android phone so far. There are some better competitors like Samsung Galaxy S or Motorola Droid series but none the less, the HTC Sense UI made the Desire comes out the best compared to others. As Android 2.2 Froyo update is on the way, you might expect more features and stability out of this phone. At the retail price of RM2199, this phone definitely worth it (Most of the shops out there are selling at RM2000 nowadays).

So if you don’t mind, time for me to hunt some good quality phone cases and also install some custom ROMs on my Desire. I’ll come up with the root procedure for this phone in a while.

Posted in: Hardware, Mobile